Toilets for all

Could he (Union Rural Development Minister, Jairam Ramesh) name one area where individual contribution would make a difference? His answer is surprising: toilets.


“To my mind, the single biggest issue that we face is sanitation,” he says. “Fifty-eight per cent of all open defecations in the world are in India. Fifty to seventy-five per cent of all Indian women defecate openly. It is a national shame, a national blot. We are trying to entice people to use toilets. We have built lakhs of toilets but people aren’t using them. We are trying to start a major Clean India campaign; communication programmes and such.”

In this article, the author seems to have been struck by a new realisation - that toilets are important. And that's part of the problem. Sanitation is urgent, and complex - and should have been our priority five decades back.

The great sanitation stink

Recently, addressing a workshop of state secretaries in-charge of Rural Water Supply and Sanitation, Jairam Ramesh​, the minister for rural development, termed it a shame that 58% of the world’s open defecation happens in India. Anyone who has worked on sanitation would take this figure with a pinch of salt, knowing how misleading sanitation coverage figures are – possibly not just in India, but all over the developing world.


A country that aspires to be a global superpower lags behind numerous other poorer countries when it comes to a ranking on the basis of the proportion of population with access to improved sanitation. In India, sanitation seems to suffer from a policy blind-spot, being overshadowed as policymakers miss the link between sanitation, hygiene, health and productivity. This has led to numerous unsuccessful policy attempts to address the issue. There are of course hundreds of successes, but rarely have they been replicated or scaled up to a degree that matters. In this piece, we would like to highlight a few broad challenges.

Excerpt from our piece published on livemint

The winner among Indian cities...

Which Indian city has the best infrastructure, the most attractive culture? In a nation where Nasscom says 90% of all graduates are unemployable, which city produces many times more competent people than it can hire? Which city is our greatest net exporter of talent? Which city will win in 20 years?

See here for the answer and more

Idle Scheming - why India's Centrally Sponsored Schemes need trimming

Centrally sponsored schemes, or CCSs, have been taking a lot of heat recently. Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar has accused the government of using centrally sponsored schemes to meddle in states’ affairs. Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi agrees. Even the Planning Commission, in its approach paper to the twelfth plan, admits that CSSs have been plagued by “poor implementation, duplication, lack of convergence and suboptimal results.” (Though we imagine the authors of the report would disagree with Kumar and Modi on whose fault this is.) As reluctant as we are to agree with a person like Modi, he and Kumar are right –the profusion of centrally sponsored schemes not only erodes state’s rights but also hinders development. The confusing morass of government policies that are centrally sponsored schemes is in drastic need of a good pruning.

Excerpt from our piece published on livemint